by Nathan Coumbe

If you value it, subsidize it

You would think that after what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing shortage of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners, we would be seeing some sort of decline in the price of these educational programs.

Fewer people going into the field would mean lower prices for those programs, right? (Supply and demand.)

Let me hypothesize why this might not be happening.

We have deeply ingrained in our culture the idea that the most important thing you can do is make a lot of money. Therefore, the best thing you can do for yourself is obtain a degree that leads to a certain type of job that pays well.

This means that, because we’ve conditioned our kids to believe that money is everything, people will continue to borrow astronomical amounts of money to attend medical school, believing that they will earn enough to cover it afterward. 

I suspect that a similar pattern is emerging with other college degrees, where individuals are borrowing six figures to earn degrees that lead to jobs paying half that or less, and this will eventually affect medical students. 

This trend is already happening with dental students. There are now a few hundred dentists in the United States who owe more than $1 million in student debt!

Tuition costs are likely to continue rising while salaries remain stagnant. Consequently, we may have doctors with $1 million in loans earning $250,000 a year (or less).

I think one solution is collective action. To make a difference, we, as a society, must unite and declare that we will not continue this way. But that’s hard to do.

The other option is to implement some form of government intervention based on the values we hold as a country.

If we believe that we need more doctors, engineers, and teachers in this country, rather than more hedge fund managers and trust-fund babies, our policies have to match that belief.

One of my professors in college—a funny little self-described country boy from the Mississippi Delta—had something of a law he preached to us:

  • If you want people to start do something, subsidize it.
  • If you want people to stop doing something, tax it.

It works: this very idea is how we almost created a generation of non-smokers.

All the ad campaigns in the world about the dangers of smoking didn’t make a difference. What worked was taxing cigarettes to make them so prohibitively expensive that most Gen-Zers never started smoking them to begin with.

Now, we’re “taxing” the wrong things in the form of tuition increases and poor salaries.

Right now, we’re making it incredibly expensive to become a doctor or engineer. Or we’re making other fields financially unviable to work in (e.g., teaching) by failing to pay practitioners what they’re worth.

Our tax incentives and subsidies (the “rewards” our government doles out) don’t help these people, but they damn sure help those who are less visibly beneficial to society but make vastly more money. It’s why we have so many people entering finance and so few entering teaching.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time we flipped this.

by Nathan Coumbe

The wrong question

The question is not,”What do you want to do when you grow up?”

It’s, “Who do you want to be?”

How do you want to contribute?

What legacy do you want to leave when you’re gone?

It might be part of what you do for a living. It might not. More likely, it will be a whole-person approach to living.

Ask the right question and you’ll get a better answer. 

by Nathan Coumbe

Love thy neighbor as thyself

Hillel the Elder was once asked to explain the Bible’s teachings as succinctly as possible.

He stood on one foot and made the following statement:

“Love thy neighbor as thyself—all the rest is commentary.”

This statement keeps going through my mind as I read the news each day. As I see what certain people are doing to others, on camera, in broad daylight.

I just want them to answer a question like: “How would you feel if you were the one being wrongfully arrested by New York police officers while on vacation?”

We are losing our humanity. We are losing our ability to empathize.

I have no positive words of encouragement today—only a reminder to love thy neighbor.

by Nathan Coumbe

Paradigms, maps, and philosphy

In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey discusses the concept of paradigms—ways of looking at the world or a field of study.

His argument is that these paradigms are like maps of places in the real world. If we have the wrong map, then we are looking at the “place” incorrectly.

An example:

If you’re trying to navigate Chicago but have a map of New York City, nothing you do with that map will help you achieve your goal of navigating Chicago.

Another example:

In Ancient Greece, physicians believed that all medical issues stem from an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). If this is your “map” of the world of medicine, you’ll end up with a lot of dead people on your conscience.

You’d be working from an incorrect map—an incorrect set of assumptions and paradigms of how the human body and medicine work.

We are dealing with a lot of this today in numerous fields. And that’s why the study of philosophy—the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things—is vital.

by Nathan Coumbe

Discipline isn’t much better…

I’m a huge fan of establishing disciplines. But for all the people who say, “It’s so much better to rely on than motivation,” I would say… “nah.”

Discipline really isn’t much better than motivation. With the latter, you’re waiting to feel “good” about something you want or need to do before you do it. With the former, you’re often making yourself feel bad because you haven’t done it yet, so you rely on beating yourself up until you do the thing.

The problem is there’s an initial sense of inertia. Which came first—the chicken or the egg? Or in this case, the motivation or the action?

The answer is, of course, the action. Motivation, the feeling, comes after we take the action or do the thing that we want to do. You actually have to do the thing to feel good about it, not wait around until you feel like it.

But that Catch-22 (you have to do the thing before you feel like doing the thing) is what stops most people. “I want to do the thing, but I don’t feel like it. But I know I have to do it before I’ll feel like it…”

Sometimes, just the realization that you won’t feel like doing it until you do it is enough to help them get over the initial resistance.

For others, they might need a nudge, or guidance, or a coach to help them get the ball rolling.

Regardless of what you need, just know that you can’t really rely on discipline or motivation. But you can rely on a plan and your own awesomeness.

In case you missed it: I added a new page to my blog where you can contact me to discuss coaching to help you with this exact kind of issue.

Check it out here!

by Nathan Coumbe

How to learn a word

The best way to learn a new word is to have it paint a picture in your mind.

Adjectives conjure images of people who embody their meaning.

Verbs project images of the actions they represent.

Few people learn words by memorizing dictionary definitions and reciting them in their minds every time they hear them. The definition is great when it’s completely new and unfamiliar, but it’s only the first step. Mastery comes from the imagery conjured by the words.

Eventually, we develop an intuitive “feel” for the meanings of words and no longer need either the definition or the image they conjure. We become fluent, and the words roll off the tongue.

This path from incompetence to mastery is present in all learning. The “grammar” is just the first step.

by Nathan Coumbe

Your job is a trust fund

Think of your job as a trust fund that provides you with a steady income, enabling you to pursue other interests. 

Want to write a book? Your job provides you with the living expenses you need to survive while you’re writing. 

Want to build a small business? Your job salary is the startup funds you need to get started. 

Don’t hold your day job in contempt because you feel like it’s preventing you from doing something great. Reframe it as the steady flow of income it is to help you launch the next thing.

by Nathan Coumbe

It’s not the tool, it’s the system

Or lack thereof.

You don’t need a better tool. You need a better system. Or you need a clearer outcome.

You think the next new software will solve your work overload. But the reality is that only good workflows that you design for yourself can do that. Software can’t help until you have that down.

You think that the next workout program or supplement will finally help you get a “ripped” body. However, neither of those matters if you don’t have a clear vision for what you actually want, or you can’t execute the boring and simple habits consistently over a long period.

It’s rarely the lack of the right tool that’s the problem anymore. Most of the time, it’s a lack of appropriate systems.

by Nathan Coumbe

Pain is an opinion

At some point in my childhood, I found myself having a self-talk conversation about pain. I can’t remember exactly what was happening, but I know whatever it was was difficult and physically painful. 

I had this realization that pain wasn’t some physical, tangible thing in or on my body. It was an electrical signal being sent from one area of my body to my brain, which was interpreting this event as pain. It wasn’t “real.” At least, that’s what my childhood brain decided. 

I proceeded to test this idea after my realization by seeing how hard I could pinch myself before giving in to that ephemeral signal sent to my brain. The next few minutes (and days) were experiments in whether the realization that pain was only a chemical reaction in my brain could inoculate against physical pain. 

Shocker – it doesn’t work like that. I still felt pain. There was always a point where I thought, “Okay, stop. This hurts.”

But I did learn something from that experiment: realizing what pain is allowed me to tolerate more of it. Telling myself that it wasn’t a “thing” in the world I could touch allowed me to feel that pain and continue hurting myself anyway.

Now, the health and sanity of this experiment can definitely be questioned. But I later learned I wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea. 

It’s actually more than 2,000 years old and described quite well by the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. 

“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

He goes on to argue that most of the things that happen to us in life we think of as “bad” are actually neutral. It’s our opinions of those events that determine whether they are good or bad, whether we’re hurt or not.

By teaching myself that this pain signal from my brain was a real thing, I removed (or at least delayed) the opinion that I was hurt and needed to stop pinching myself. It allowed me to push beyond my normal pain tolerance and endure more of it.

Let me give you another, less childish example. 

People who go into special operations selection (think Navy SEALs or Green Berets) don’t do it believing they’ll breeze through. No matter how hard they train and prepare, they know it will suck. It’ll hurt, and that’s by design. 

The goal in that environment isn’t to breeze through without feeling pain; it’s to endure the pain and keep going anyway. The cadre screen for people who can do that, because it’s often necessary in a real-world operation. 

If you’ve been shot and you’re stuck in the middle of enemy territory, you don’t get a sick day. You must accept the pain, the injury, even the very real damage you’ve incurred… And you have to get your ass out of Dodge anyway, probably while carrying one of your injured teammates out, too. 

They can do this, not because they are superhuman, but because they’ve trained themselves to feel the very real pain and keep going anyway.

So, yes, pain and injury are real. But how it affects us and our ability to perform—how it affects what we’re capable of—is often overblown by our opinion of that pain.

by Nathan Coumbe

More bad ideas lead to more creativity

For most of us, if we want to be more original, to be more successful, to be more “renowned,” the key is to have more ideas. To create more things.

You need to focus on the quantity of work you create—the output—and less on the quality.

Why? You need bad ideas to come up with a few good ones. 

Seth Godin has a great rant about this around writer’s block. People don’t actually get writer’s block. They are afraid of writing down bad ideas and claim they have no good ideas.

Good ideas often come through sheer volume.